Page 100 of Resurfaced Passion

Hells bells, he cooked too?

“Morning, baby. Ready for coffee?”

For a person who rose most days at three thirty, Paige wasn’t all that cheerful for the first hour of every day. All that changed when she started having sleepovers with Reaper. Now she was an insanely grinning clown crossing her kitchen to accept a mug of coffee.

“I was going to make you waffles.” She said looking at the steaming plate of eggs and bacon. The folded omelet looked perfect, slightly browned with flecks of greenery inside and ooey-gooey cheese pouring out at the sides. Alongside it laid inch thick strips of bacon and it was done to a charred crisp. “How did you know that’s how I like my bacon?”

“Lucky guess.” He half-smiled and kissed the top of her head.

Before she took a seat, she stopped him in his tracks.

“Take off your shirt.”

He all but growled his delight and swooped in as if to kiss her. Paige, although amused, stopped him with a hand on his chest. “Calm down, Fabio. I want to put cream on your bruises.”

Reaper frowned but whipped the shirt over his head.

She winced and got mad all over again. It was even worse today. Big, ugly yellow and purple bruising covered most of one side of his torso and she knew they were tender because a few times during the night she’d come up against his ribs and his moan rang in her ears.

“You need to get checked out,” she told him, slathering cream to help the bruising as gently as she could, keeping her own upset in check this time. He stood quietly, his head cranked down to her and let her tend to him. “These could be broken. You could have internal bleeding.”

A hand tangled in the back of her hair; Reaper’s blunt nails scratched her scalp softly. “I’m good, baby, but I’ll get The Butcher to look at it when I ride into the club.”

She hmphed and recapped the cream. She supposed it was the best she could hope for. Winter had warned her about the biker mentality of being complacently stubborn, albeit for the right reasons usually, this was it, she thought.

“Thank you, baby.” He said, pulling his shirt back on.

Breakfast was a quiet affair, mostly Paige chewing and contemplating through her thoughts. She wasn’t crazy enough to not share a kiss with him at the door when he left for work.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“Found you.” – Sargent

“Yo, ghost. You didn’t tell us you were dating a celebrity.” Called out Pretty-boy from the other end of the common room loud enough his voice echoed around the high ceilings.

When Reaper looked up from his chess game with Krusher and saw a group of the boys around the TV, his heart nearly collapsed in his chest.

His Paige was smiling on the screen.

His girl was on TV in her form-fitting peach uniform, those black and yellow striped tights she loved and her hair in a thick rope down her back. Smiling like she was at the Oscars while she gave an interview to the person behind the camera.

His goddamn thumping heart quit beating and he nearly broke the chair in his haste to stand, it skidded on the scuffed floor.

The words Paige was saying all became static noise through his ears. He caught her talking a big game about the diner in her sweet way, how the chef was revolutionizing the menu, the popular desserts and how family-friendly the place was.

Why in the good fuck was she on goddamn TV when he thought this had been decided?

“She looks good, a natural, talking up the diner like that.”

“Didya know she was gonna be on? We could have gone for breakfast and got Snake’s ugly mug on TV.”

“Gonna be seeing you at the Met Gala now, brother?”

“I’m disturbed as fuck that you know about the Met Gala.”

“Fuck you, I read shit.”

He tuned out the boys running conversation because he was trying to breathe. His stomach bottomed out and he stopped right there in the middle of the common room, staring at the screen until Paige’s three-minute segment ended.

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